Ottawa Citizen » peter simpsonhttp://ottawacitizen.com
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 20:20:51 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://0.gravatar.com/blavatar/034e689d25278f80f8281f2c424607c3?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.png » peter simpsonhttp://ottawacitizen.com
Big Beat: Step on my art, please, artist sayshttp://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/art-review-craig-leonard-is-messing-with-your-mind
http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/art-review-craig-leonard-is-messing-with-your-mind#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 19:43:32 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=474586]]>A few years ago, I took a young nephew to the National Gallery and we were standing next to Court — the artist Brian Jungen’s basketball court made of sweat-shop sewing machine tables — when my overly exuberant nephew hopped up onto the court’s surface. A security guard ordered him down, and rightly so, for it’s a golden rule of galleries that you do not step on the art.

The problem for Craig Leonard isn’t that people will step on his installation of art at Central Art Garage in Ottawa, it’s that people won’t step on it, because they’re been trained to not do so. When apparently allowed to do otherwise, people become uncertain and conflicted with their own common sense — which is precisely where Leonard wants them to be.

I can testify to the effectiveness of Leonard’s mind-messing installation, for I have I tromped all over it with my wet winter boots. I may have spilled a drop of wine on it, but who cares? Everyone who steps or spills on Leonard’s installation contributes to the finished piece — a state it will achieve only when the show closes on March 20.

Leonard is a quirkily conceptual artist based in Nova Scotia. His work was included in the celebrated exhibition Oh, Canada in Massachusetts. He’s an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where the website offers a crazily eccentric list of his recent work, including, “handmade records for the Los Angeles punk band the Screamers, a collaborative project with the Maritime History Archive on Newfoundland’s resettlement program, an examination of the Cuban Independent Library Movement, and a bookwork consisting of obsolete concepts from the Oxford English Dictionary.” Typically, even a description of Leonard’s work prompts a sense of befuddlement.

The earliest taste of Leonard’s that I’ve encountered is a small ad he put into a Toronto newspaper in 2003, which made the curious offer, “Artist to re-arrange your furniture. Free of charge. Call Craig. . .” Most responses were incredulous, Leonard says, as readers couldn’t figure out whether it was a real offer. (It was, though his real goal was to rearrange not furniture, but the viewers’ perceptions.)

Fast-forward 12 years to the recent opening of Shaken Antlers, his installation in Ottawa. (Don’t ask about the title, he’s not telling.) Central Art Garage is a small space, part gallery and part framing shop, and Leonard’s piece is a low stage, covered with 24 cork mats, that stretches clear from one wall to the other. If you want to enter the main part of the shop and you’re not a world-class long jumper, you cannot avoid the decision of whether to step on the art, and nobody is there to tell you right thing to do.

“I am interested in subtly making the familiar strange so there is a point of entry, but no reliable resolution,” Leonard tells me. “The creation of defamiliarized experience, then, means the possibility of the creation of new origins. Herein, for me, is art’s political function.”

Not the usual politics in Ottawa, but more entertaining to watch. On opening night visitors clustered just inside the garage door, not sure what to do even as they could see other people standing on the stage/installation.

The cork mats are being sold for $300 each, but stay in place to March 20, by which point each will bear its own, distinct constellation of scuffs and stains.

Leonard isn’t the first to make art to be stepped upon, but his choice of simple, quotidian materials heightens the bewildering effect. These pieces of wood and cork mat are things we often do step upon, yet here they have become art, which we do not step upon, but the artist wants us to and. . . oh, down we go, into Leonard’s rabbit hole of uncertainty.

One visitor, Ottawa photographer Jake Morrison, told me that he sees himself as “someone who doesn’t have a lot of time for rules,” but Leonard’s conundrum showed him that is “not true, I guess, at least for art.” Morrison said the piece was “extraordinary,” and that he can’t remember another work of art “that affected me so directly and strongly.”

Shaken Antlers: Installation by Craig Leonard

When & where: to March 20 at Central Art Garage, 66B Lebreton St. North

http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/art-review-craig-leonard-is-messing-with-your-mind/feed0stiles-2386citizenbigbeatVisitors are uncertain whether to step onto Craig Leonard's installation, titled Shaken Antlers, at Central Art Garage in Ottawa. (Photo courtesy Danny Hussey, Central Art Garage)Big Beat: Portraits of Iranian 'soldiers' should make the West thinkhttp://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/review-photographs-cast-irans-sacred-defence-in-an-unseen-light
http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/review-photographs-cast-irans-sacred-defence-in-an-unseen-light#commentsSat, 28 Feb 2015 19:28:04 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=468187]]>War is about fighting “the other,” and however that other is defined, the sense of a threatening, alien force makes the killing seem more just, and perhaps easier. Art can be twisted into propaganda to serve that manufactured alienation, but art can also show how the other is not so different after all, as shown in a new exhibition at PDA Projects.

Aydin Matlabi photographs demonstrate how similar people are, regardless of culture or religion or geography.

Matlabi’s exhibition, open to March 21, considers the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s in a collection of portraits titled Sacred Defence, which is the phrase Iran uses to memorialize its war dead.

“The Iranian government glorifies the deaths of Sacred Defence soldiers through the Islamic lens of sacred martyrdom,” writes Matlabi in his exhibition notes. “Like many families from many countries, some are left wondering: Why did their sons, fathers, or brothers ever have to die?”

That question challenges a western stereotype that sees Muslim soldiers as uniformly rushing to fight for a “sacred” cause, and that sees “martyrdom” as a great solace to families of soldiers who die in battle. Matlabi’s work is a reminder that parents in Iran often ask if the sacrifices were necessary, just as parents of dead soldiers may do in Canada, or the United States, or Israel, or Iraq.

Matlabi’s exhibition is no can’t-we-all-just-get-along entreaty. There is nothing platitudinal about his portraits, which cast young, Iranian expatriate men — like Matlabi, a 32-year-old Montrealer who fled Iran with his family as refugees in the 1980s — as models of dead soldiers.

Related

The young men stand or sit and look directly into the camera. Each seems to be naked, but swaddled in rich, red fabric — the colour of blood, of the Sacred Defence, and also of the Remembrance Day poppy, or the international Red Cross. (“Red means hope, it also means violence. It’s a duality,” Matlabi says.) In one portrait a man named Barzin looks as if he is disappearing into the red. Another man, Nima, wears the red like a sarong, revealing for inspection the tattoos that densely cover his arms, neck, chest and torso.

In each portrait there is individuality, as the characteristics and physique of the men are revealed. To this Matlabi adds uniformity — the red palette, the impassive expressions, the implied sacrifice of death. He leads the viewer to consider the individual within the uniform, and from there to reflect upon what is awfully lost in war.

This is not how people in the Western World are programmed to consider soldiers of a Muslim army. This matters, because the relationship between Iran and the West is tense and distrustful, and the potential for conflict is real. Matlabi demonstrates our national commonalities — how each nation has a compulsion to make heroes of its soldiers, for better or worse (consider the current example of the controversial film American Sniper); how each nation struggles to reconcile patriotism and slaughter, how each nation is averse to acknowledging its own bloody past.

Matlabi’s primary goal with Sacred Defence is for Iran to address its own “dark, bloody history,” which he says is essential if the nation is to achieve lasting peace, true freedom, and progress. He wants Iranians to honestly accept the bloody parts of their history, but at the same time he says, “don’t impose it on the generations coming up. Tell the truth.”

In one way or another, it’s a truth that most any nation can ask itself, and in doing so perhaps be more accepting of the other.

The Portrait of Barzin, (40 by 60 inches, Lambda print, edition of five) by Aydin Matlabi at PDA Projects in Ottawa.

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/review-photographs-cast-irans-sacred-defence-in-an-unseen-light/feed0020315-MATLABI_SACRED_DEFENCE_40x40_C-PRINT_Edition_of_15_2013.jpg-36314611-MATLABI_SACRED_DEFENCE_40x40_C-PRINT_Edition_of_15_2013-W.jpgcitizenbigbeatThe Portrait of Barzin, (40 by 60 inches, Lambda print, edition of five) by Aydin Matlabi at PDA Projects in Ottawa. Big Beat: A morning at the birthplace of rock and rollhttp://ottawacitizen.com/travel/in-the-temple-of-the-sun-the-memphis-studio-where-rock-and-roll-began
http://ottawacitizen.com/travel/in-the-temple-of-the-sun-the-memphis-studio-where-rock-and-roll-began#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 15:34:01 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=457412]]>We each have our sacred places, and I’ve discovered one of mine in Memphis, Tennessee. It is not Graceland.

Early in February, Mrs. Big Beat and I are on a road trip across the southern United States. It’s been BBQ and live music — rockabilly in Austin, a Cajun jam in Lafayette, brassy jazz on the streets in New Orleans, and blues in downtown Memphis. Now it’s a sunny morning outside the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Ave, and we’re walking in the steps of some of the greatest names in music, of people who changed popular culture. The Memphis Recording Service, opened Jan. 3, 1950 by Sam Phillips, is now better known as Sun Studio, “the birthplace of rock and roll.”

Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley at the Sun studio in Memphis.

Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash and many others made records in the Sun studio, but it was no passing stop on their journeys to musical immortality. Were it not for Phillips and his studio, we may never have heard of Elvis. Rock and roll would have been born at some time, but who knows when, or what direction it would have taken from that delayed, seminal moment?

The Memphis Recording Service is an office and a studio, both small and plain. The acoustic panels on the walls show decades of age. The floor is worn by many famous feet and — since the building reopened as a recording venue and tourist draw in the 1980s — by the endless shuffling of fans, some nostalgic, some admiring, and some, like me, reverential.

Even on a Tuesday morning in February, the place is busy. We enter the gift shop through a front door that is beneath a giant sign shaped like a Gibson guitar, complete with a Bigsby bridge. If the wind blew hard enough you might hear a bit of country twang.

Sun Studio, at junction of Sam Phillips Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee.

The studio shop has booths with mini jukeboxes and a bar, like a soda shop (which it may have been at some point). There are T-shirts with Sun logos, and a few original Sun recordings on vinyl or CD. Tours start at the back, and up steep, narrow stairs to a small museum room that has old recording equipment, a few bits of Elvis memorabilia, and the reassembled broadcast studio from which Elvis’s music was first played on radio.

Then the tour moves down another steep set of stairs and into the studio, and I begin to feel the weight of where I am. Before there was rock and roll, Phillips was recording the greatest names in blues in this room, a legacy that continues to attract musicians to 706 Union Ave. to record, from U2 to Ottawa’s JW-Jones.

“I wanted to record at Sun Studios because it was one of the original studios for great blues artists like Howlin’ Wolf, James Cotton, Little Milton, and so many more,” says Jones, of his 2010 album Midnight Memphis Sun. “There is something special about that room, and what those walls have absorbed.”

The walls absorbed the moment in March, 1951 when, many people have argued, rock and roll was born. Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (in fact, Ike Turner’s band), recorded Rocket 88, using a busted amplifier that gave the guitars a fuzzy, unprecedented sound that Phillips loved.

Sam Phillips and Johnny Cash.

Two years later, a teenaged Elvis Presley walked into the Sun office, and the moment is recalled in Last Train to Memphis, the first of Peter Guralnick’s epic, two-volume bio of Elvis. “Who do you sound like?” office manager Marion Keisker asked. Elvis replied, “I don’t sound like nobody.”

Phillips hooked Elvis up with session musicians Scotty Moore and Bill Black, and for months the trio came up with nothing special. Then, while all were taking a break after a long, fruitless recording session on July 5, 1954, Elvis started to sing the old Arthur Crudup song That’s All Right Mama in, as our tour guide at Sun puts it, “his way.” Moore and Black jumped in, incongruously playing in a country style on what was a blues/R&B standard, and Phillips hit the record button. A few days later the track was played on radio, to wild acclaim. The superstar was born and western culture would never be the same.

Almost 60 years later, we listen to the song in the room where it was recorded. A chill goes through me, and it doesn’t end there.

The alumni of this room is almost unbelievable, spanning from Roy Orbison to Conway Twitty, but a few songs stand apart. Carl Perkins recorded Blue Suede Shoes here. Jerry Lee Lewis recorded Great Balls of Fire here. Then our guide says what I’ve been waiting for: “And, of course, Johnny Cash recorded Folsom Prison Blues and I Walk the Line in this room.”

That recording of I Walk the Line, from May 1, 1956, comes over the speakers, and I’m struck dumb. Our guide happens to look my way for a reaction to the music and I can only nod my head. If I try to speak my voice will break. I can barely breathe. As Cash sings “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine,” in the same studio where he recorded it, I feel my own heart rate increasing. I realize that I’ve stumbled into a spiritual experience I never expected. I have found my temple.

I sit on the piano bench, and I understand why Bob Dylan once visited this studio just to kiss the floor. Behind me on the wall is the famous photograph of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis — the “Million Dollar Quartet” — that was taken in this studio on Dec. 4, 1956. Mrs. Big Beat snaps a photo of me beneath that photo, a souvenir of my moment in the Sun.

http://ottawacitizen.com/travel/in-the-temple-of-the-sun-the-memphis-studio-where-rock-and-roll-began/feed0022015-IMG_6739.jpg-36625619-IMG_6739-W.jpgcitizenbigbeatSam Phillips and Elvis Presley.Sun Studio, at junction of Sam Phillips Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee. Sam Phillips and Johnny Cash. Big Beat: City celebs pick favourite paintings from OAGhttp://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/celebrities-pick-favourites-from-ottawa-art-gallerys-firestone-collection
http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/celebrities-pick-favourites-from-ottawa-art-gallerys-firestone-collection#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 22:29:37 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=468336]]>The Ottawa Art Gallery asked a few well-known Ottawa residents to choose their favourite paintings from the Firestone Collection of Canadian Art, and the results are on exhibit in the OAG Annex at city hall.

Participants include author Charlotte Gray, restauranteur Steve Mitton, the architect Douglas Cardinal and others. Two selections are included in this post, from astronaut Steve MacLean and Ottawa’s ubiquitous mayor Jim Watson.

MacLean chose Claude Picher’s 1969 painting Icebreaking – St. Lawrence River (at top of post). “The ice attracts me – especially if you look at it from a few meters back, you can almost hear the grinding and groaning of what the ice is like,” MacLean says in a gallery release. “It’s rare that a painting has sound to me. When you fly over an ice field from space there is no sound, and the painting reflects the fact that you have to imagine the sound.”

Mayor Watson chose Philip Surrey’s 1972 painting Tourist Bus (below, and I’ll second the motion that it’s one of the best works in the collection, with its vibrant charm and warm pastels). “Philip Surrey has captured the vital importance of transit and the patterned movements of tourists as they wander a scenic destination in Montreal, the city where I grew up,” Watson says.

The exhibition is titled Ottawa Selects, and it’s at the OAG Annex indefinitely. The official opening starts at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26 (which is today, if you’re reading this post while it’s still warm from the oven).

Luminère tactile, in the Art-image gallery, impresses at every step. The Montreal artists Dimo Ivanov and Sonia Stoeva created light boxes and interactive videos that stir up a soup of emotive responses, from serenity to angst.

The exhibition is about light and water, and how those elements react to us and we to them. I found it impossible to approach any piece on display without having a strong response of some sort, so effectively have Ivanov and Stoeva captured our dual relationship with the natural world around us. In this world we are both catalyst and constituent, changing all that we engage, while we too are changed by the exposure and experience.

Ivanov and Stoeva bring the viewer into the darkened gallery to gaze upon a half-dozen or so pieces, each working to provoke a sense of wonder and disquietude. It begins with two ambiguous light boxes that provoke the imagination. I’m told that inside the light boxes is everyday aluminum foil, yet it produces an effect of thick, turbulent clouds. I think of the sky in a Turner painting, or the sedimentary mist roiling through an Edward Burtynsky photograph. I see storm clouds gathering in the distance on a hot summer day. It is a marvellous effect created with pedestrian materials.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a group of 10 or 12 interactive video screens that are arranged in a circle and face outwards. Each screen shows the surface of a body of water, with a lunar light casting the ripples in metallic blues, greys, greens and blacks.

As I approach a screen the surface of the water darkens and becomes agitated. I step back and peaceful waters return. I slowly walk around the column, and the disturbance leaps from screen to screen, and heightens my sense that I change nature merely but putting myself in its presence. Only by my stepping away from it can nature return it to its undisturbed state. A few other screens reinforce, in similar but complementary ways, my sense of being an element of change in the natural world.

I don’t leave Lumière tactile feeling that we humans are aliens in nature, or that we have no place in it. Rather, I leave with a sharpened awareness of my responsibility to nature, the legacy of this potent reminder created by Ivanov and Stoeva.

A selection of Petra Halkes’ smaller canvases in the exhibition The Painted Light Bulb, at the Maison de la culture in Gatineau. (Photos Vickie Séguin and Marie Hélène Giguère, Art-image)

THE PAINTED LIGHT BULB

The ability to effectively create light in a painting has always separated the Caravaggios from the chaff, and Petra Halkes, the Ottawa artist, has often and admirably painted light in its various guises. For example, Halkes’ previous paintings that put the viewer inside a moving vehicle, as the lights of retail stores flashed by, transformed the garish glow of commerce into moments of transitory beauty. Her most recent paintings are, for the most part, less transformative.

The Painted Light Bulb, at the espace Odyssée in the Maison de la Culture to May 24, includes several dozen paintings of bulbs of all types, from the beckoning promise of a show-biz twinkler to the unadorned functionality of a compact fluorescent.

Most successful are the larger works, including a triptych that dominates the room, titled Celestial Ceiling #02, and a large single panel, titled Marquee, that teases of Broadway. The large panels flirt with an abstraction that fires the bulbs with a sense of magical mystery, or anticipation. That magic is missing from the more numerous and smaller works, which are straight-up studies of light bulbs and fixtures.

I know that a painter can turn a plain bulb into a compelling thing — Ottawa artist Katherine McNenly’s still lifes are the proof — yet I couldn’t find a way into Halkes’ bulbs, and I decided that that access was blocked by how the bulbs are portrayed. McNenly’s bulbs were unscrewed and arranged on a countertop, where their design and shape could be studied and admired, and their singular purpose imagined. Halkes’ bulbs are screwed in and turned on, so each is but a circle of light, and despite the variations in size and shape and placement from one canvas to the next, all is dimmed by a sense of repetition, and a bland whiteness.

I walked away with the newfound awareness that a light bulb that is doing its job may be most useful, but a bulb left dark, so its form and curves can be considered, is a more intriguing subject.

The Massachusetts-based piano man, who died Friday, Feb. 13 after a long struggle with cancer, played “hundreds of shows” at RBC Bluesfest in Ottawa over 15 or so years, says Bluesfest spokesman AJ Sauve.

Maxwell, who was 71, was part of the “house band” at Bluesfest, and sat on the festival’s various stages with many touring musicians. Bluesfest board member Connor Grimes offers a shortlist of just a few of the acts who were backed by Maxwell’s piano, including Buddy Guy, Monkeyjunk, John Primer, Mel Brown, Otis Rush, Thornetta Davis, Billy Branch, Carl Weathersby, Larry Garner, Marcia Ball, Larry Garner, Curtis Salgado, Sherman Robertson, the Texas Horns,” and so on.

Suffice to say that Maxwell was as essential to Bluesfest as he was to the blues overall, having elsewhere played with Muddy Waters, Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker, Levon Helm, James Cotton and many others.

“David has been acknowledged as one of the finest blues pianists in his lifetime for the many different styles of blues, boogie-woogie, jazz, world and improvised music,” says an obituary in the Boston Globe. Click here to read the full obituary.

Via the obituary, Maxwell’s family encourages fans to “become a member of the Blues Foundation and vote before March 1st for David to win the W.C. Handy 2015 Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year Blues Music Award.” Click here to join and vote.

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Below are a couple of fan videos of David Maxwell performing at Ottawa Bluesfest.

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/bluesfest-fixture-david-maxwell-dies-of-cancer/feed0Screen Shot 2015-02-23 at 10.48.46 AMcitizenbigbeatBig Beat: U.S. art stars in speaking series in Ottawahttp://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/big-names-in-american-art-are-coming-to-speak-at-the-national-gallery
http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/big-names-in-american-art-are-coming-to-speak-at-the-national-gallery#commentsFri, 20 Feb 2015 20:26:05 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=460920]]>Big names in American art are coming to Ottawa as cultural diplomats to talk about art, and how it transcends borders.

Contemporary Conversations, to be held at the National Gallery on four nights during 2015, will bring in performance artist Nick Cave, the “Bad Boy” painter and sculptor Eric Fischl, photographer Stephen Wilkes, and Native American multi-media artist Marie Watt, who will launch the series on Feb. 26.

“Art breaks down walls,” said Vicki Heyman, the wife of the United States ambassador to Canada Bruce Heyman, and a driving force behind the conversations project. “How,” Heyman said during an interview this week at the U.S. residence in Rockcliffe, “do we use art, and the artist’s voice, as a driver for coming together across the border?”

The series is a joint project of the National Gallery and the U.S. embassy, and is a complement to Art in Embassies, a program funded by the U.S. State Department. The Art in Embassies program encourages artists, collectors and galleries to loan works to ambassadorial residences.

At each Conversations event the artist will have a discussion onstage about his or her art, and the role of art in society. At the inaugural event Marie Watt will talk with Greg Hill, the gallery’s Audain curator of indigenous art, and an artist in his own right.

Watt is familiar to Ottawa. Her installation Blanket Stories— typically collaborative — was a key part of Sakahan, the National Gallery’s 2013 exhibition of indigenous art from around the world. A similar piece by Watt is part of the Art in Embassies exhibition at the U.S. residence on Lisgar Road. The private exhibition also has a large photograph of Ellis Island by Wilkes, one of Cave’s elaborate “sound suits,” and a disquieting painting and maquette by Fischl that were inspired by the horrors of 9/11. There are also works by Theaster Gattes and Hung Liu, a magnificent painting of flowers on linen by Alex Katz, and Chuck Close’s portrait of Barack Obama — which is owned by the Heymans, and signed by the president.

As Vicki Heyman showed me the works her keenness to talk about art was evident. She wants the Conversations series to spark discussions about art at the gallery and among the general public. There’s a hashtag — #artconvoAIE — to take the conversation online.

“We’re . . . encouraging people to have a conversation about the message of art and artists,” Heyman said. “There’ll be many conversations, and the more the better.”

The visiting artists will take part in other public events in Ottawa. Watt will host a sewing circle in the gallery’s Great Hall from noon to 3 p.m. on Feb. 28. Anyone can take part, and contribute to works that Watt will exhibit this summer. Watt will also be involved in a seminar-style conversation about “indigenizing the gallery,” at Carleton University Art Gallery from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m., Feb. 27. Participants will include other artists and curators, and the public is free to speak up. Admission is also free.

Other public events around the Conversations series haven’t been revealed, but it is known that when Fischl sits down on Sept. 10 he’ll speak with National Gallery director Marc Mayer. Moderators have yet to be chosen for visits by Nick Cave, on May 28, and Stephen Wilkes, on Nov. 19. I have unsolicited recommendations for both . . .

For Cave, I suggest Stefan St-Laurent, who is director at AXENEO7, the artist-run centre in Gatineau, and who, like Cave, is an installation artist who uses his own body as a platform. For Wilkes I suggest Tony Fouhse, the Ottawa photographer who, like Wilkes, uncompromisingly straddles the worlds of advertising and fine arts, and excels at both portraiture and architectural photography.

Both Fouhse and St-Laurent are outspoken and can speak about art in plain language, which is essential if Contemporary Conversations is to reach the general population. Yet it’s likely the moderators will be chosen from among the gallery’s own curators, who tend more towards the esoteric than the everyday, and that can discourage public interest.

All conversations are open to the public and admission is free, though advance registration is required. Space is limited.

Contemporary Conversations

When & where: 6 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 26, at the National Gallery.

Tickets: Entrance is free. Registration required by Feb. 24 at rsvp@gallery.ca, or 613-991-6516

During the annual event, organized by the public library systems in Ottawa and Gatineau, and the CBC, visitors or “readers” can check out a “human book” for 20 minutes. Reservations for check outs are made on site. The visitors can then ask the notable volunteer about their experience, and what it’s like to be them.

On the arts and entertainment side, this year’s participants include comedian Kalyani Pandya, cartoonist Tim Fowler and Peking Opera performer William Lau.

http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/human-library-including-entertainers-returns-saturday/feed0HR_HumanLib_118citizenbigbeatBig Beat: Paintings of Cuba, warm and changing quicklyhttp://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/cuba-in-paintings-is-both-warm-and-charming
http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/cuba-in-paintings-is-both-warm-and-charming#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 22:31:12 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=460190]]>It seems as if todo el mundo and their perro are heading to Cuba to escape the brutal cold in Ottawa. When they return, Ross Rheaume’s new paintings might be welcome and warming reminders of their brief, sunny escapes.

The series of paintings is entitled Havana and the Delicious Madness, and Rheaume captures the old, communist city’s streets, architecture and anachronistic automobiles, all in a reverential style of painting that itself may seem charmingly old-fashioned in these digitally obsessed times.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering what’ll happen to all those old cars, that are such a characteristic feature of Cuba, when the tiny nation is opened to American visitors and money. Will all the cars be snapped up by American collectors and shipped stateside? It would be sad to see that charismatic feature of Cuban culture lost.

Ross Rheaume’s new paintings of Cuba are at Galerie Old Chelsea. (Photo courtesy the artist)

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/cuba-in-paintings-is-both-warm-and-charming/feed0floriditacitizenbigbeatRoss Rheaume's new paintings of Cuba are at Galerie Old Chelsea. (Photo courtesy the artist)Big Beat: Jack Bush show closing soon, with record-breaking paintinghttp://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/jack-bush-closing-soon-at-ngc-including-his-most-expensive-painting
http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/jack-bush-closing-soon-at-ngc-including-his-most-expensive-painting#commentsWed, 18 Feb 2015 21:27:59 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=459660]]>There are only a few more days to see the exhibition of paintings by Jack Bush at the National Gallery, including the painting that recently set a new record auction price for Bush’s work, after it was sold by one of the most beloved crooners in popular music.

The widely acclaimed Bush exhibition closes Feb. 22, but until then there are dozens of canvases made by the late, Canadian abstract expressionist to be seen.

They include the 1965 painting Right Side Red (“also known as Red Side Right”), which for many years was owned by the singer and TV personality Andy Williams. Williams was an avid collector of work by Bush, who had established a professional reputation for himself in both the United States and Europe.

After Williams’ death in 2012, four Bush paintings from his collection were earmarked for auction, and the bidding began on July 17, 2013 at Christie’s auction house in New York City.

The pre-sale estimates were absurdly low, with none of the Bush paintings expected to bring more than $50,000 (all figures US). In fact, Right Side Red sold for $603,750. The least that any of the four Bush paintings brought at the auction was $219,750.

Auction reports typically don’t identify the buyer of any sale, but the wall card beside Right Side Red at the National Gallery says it’s on loan from the “Collection of Cam Allard.” Cam Allard is a real-estate developer, racing horse owner and Jack Bush collector in Edmonton.

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Right Side Red, the Jack Bush painting that set a sales record for Bush’s work in 2013. It’s part of the Bush exhibition that continues at the National Gallery in Ottawa to Feb. 22.

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/jack-bush-closing-soon-at-ngc-including-his-most-expensive-painting/feed010380_jack_bush_1020citizenbigbeatRight Side Red, the Jack Bush painting that set a sales record for Bush's work in 2013. It's part of the Bush exhibition that continues at the National Gallery in Ottawa to Feb. 22.